


rosemary (for remembrance)

by kittenscully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s04e10 Paper Hearts, F/M, POV Dana Scully, Post-Episode: s04e10 Paper Hearts, Season/Series 04, Smut, tragedy-related metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:34:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26344930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittenscully/pseuds/kittenscully
Summary: She reaches for him, unable to stop herself. His jaw is rough under her hands, and she can feel his pulse at his temples, drumming away at his brain, unforgiving and warlike. When she pulls his head down to rest on her shoulder, his faint sob is audible, and she goes up on her tiptoes instinctively, trying to present him with more of her body to collapse against. If he asked, she knows that she would give him all of it, gather tears between her breasts, bleed openly for him between her ribs, drown his grief between her thighs.[in which Scully offers herself, with flowers.]
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 9
Kudos: 138





	rosemary (for remembrance)

“Why don’t you go on home and get some sleep?”

In her concern, Scully realizes too late the obvious problem with the suggestion. Mulder’s responding smile is an unexpected reward, arm curling around her waist, big palm settling on her hip to pull her in. The casual affection is obvious and lacking hesitation, as if he knows that she is his. 

She feels his laughter like her own. 

The swoop in her chest is too much, far too much. It’s with wary hands that she touches his hair, soft between her fingers. His face nestled into her stomach, breath warming her even through her blazer. The intimacy is not lost on her, not this time.

Scully lets him go too soon, his absence immediate in her gut, and turns to leave. Over her shoulder, she sees the smile lingering, the little rush of ensuing satisfaction buoying her out the door.

And she tries to make her way to the elevator, of course she does. But her feet, she finds, will not let her move. The door handle is still within reach, the creaky shelving unit behind her groaning under the press of her back. Inside, she knows, the brief moment of happiness has faded. He will be touching the cloth heart again, his eyes listless and tired, head hanging low like a little kid. He won’t sleep, not tonight, and maybe not tomorrow, either. 

As much as witnessing his grief stings, the idea of leaving him to it alone cuts her twice as deep.

Swallowing, she moves back into the office. 

“Scully?” The surprise in his voice is what gets to her. Sad and confused. 

She scolds herself, in the back of her mind, for letting him think that she’d abandon him like this, even for a moment. 

“C’mon, Mulder.” She sidesteps a stack of papers, outstretches her hand. “I’m taking you home.”

It is a testament to how wounded he is, that he doesn’t even begin to argue. His hand slides into hers, his expression near to crumpling, and she pulls him to his full height, a low-hanging willow tree towering above her. 

For once, Scully doesn’t overthink her decision, driving them straight to her place. If Mulder takes issue with their destination, he doesn’t say, simply follows up the stairs of the building like a stray dog. As she leads him into her apartment, she fancies herself a professional, a doctor, caring for a patient by prescribing a bed. Never mind that the bed is hers, or that the patient is a man she wishes was hers as well.

He hasn’t spoken a word since leaving work, and neither has she, but the sort of silence between them has become an indicator of exhaustion, rather than discomfort. Like the quiet in a house after a long day, when there’s nothing left to be said.

She runs him a glass of water at the sink as he slumps against her counter, and she glances at him periodically, not wanting to look too long. A furrowed brow, a bitten lower lip, restless hands fidgeting together. Rumpled Oxford, crooked tie, hair flopping over his forehead. The slight hunch of his back, as if carrying a corpse, or sixteen corpses, all paisley pajamas and damaged innocence. She thinks of Hamlet, of suffering and sacrifice. Rosemary, for remembrance. 

There is no way to shoulder the weight for him. She hands him the water glass, and can’t resist reaching out to straighten his tie as he drinks, a poor substitute. His hand interrupts her mid-adjustment, tugging roughly at the knot to loosen the tie, and she rests her palm against his sternum instead, body heat radiating through skin and muscle.

Even askew with tragedy, radiating hurt, he is still warm enough to draw her in, the magnetic north to her compass.

She moves away quickly, ignoring the selfish tug in her own chest. There is a change of clothes for him here, she remembers, stored in her bottom bureau drawer. She clings to the practicality like a lifeline, steps out of her shoes on her way to the bedroom. This is no time to be distracted by wanting him.

Blazer discarded, Mulder’s Okabogee t-shirt and sweatpants slung over her arm, Scully makes to head back to the kitchen, only to find him in the doorway instead. Shifting from foot to foot, he is physically nervous, and it takes her every ounce of restraint not to reach for him, comfort him. 

“Scully,” he tells her. His voice croaks a little. 

“What, Mulder?”

“I can get a taxi,” he says. 

“No,” she disagrees, not even giving herself the chance to consider it. “You need rest, Mulder. In a bed.”

“I’m not gonna take your bed, Scully.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’ve put you through enough,” he says, not meeting her eye. 

“You haven’t put me through anything, Mulder,” she says. She sets down the clothes. “It was my choice, and I chose to go through it with you.”

She watches his forehead knock against the doorframe. Nearing on four years, now, and she has watched him attempt repeatedly to go where she can’t follow, has witnessed him near death more than once. But somehow, she’s never seen never so broken open as these past few days. Without touching him, she doesn’t know what to do with his grief, how to lessen it or distract him. She’s never been very good with verbal comfort.

“You were right about him, Scully,” he says, and it sounds like work, to keep his voice from breaking. “And about me. You were right the whole time.”

For just a moment, he meets her gaze, and the pain there makes her lungs collapse.

“Oh, Mulder.”

She reaches for him, unable to stop herself. His jaw is rough under her hands, and she can feel his pulse at his temples, drumming away at his brain, unforgiving and warlike. When she pulls his head down to rest on her shoulder, his faint sob is audible, and she goes up on her tiptoes instinctively, trying to present him with more of her body to collapse against. If he asked, she knows that she would give him all of it, gather tears between her breasts, bleed openly for him between her ribs, drown his grief between her thighs.

The tension in his spine is palpable, decades of guilt wound around every vertebra, deadly like snake venom, unerring like a haunting. She wishes that she could cut him open and clear it away, set it aside like autopsy shrapnel until he is wholly Mulder, uncorrupted, once more. 

In a fumble of limbs and tears, Scully shuffles him over to her bed and sits him down, his head sliding off her shoulder to settle against her heart. Like this, her standing between his legs, it’s easy for him to cling to her, his arms wound around her waist. Somewhere in the depths of her subconscious, she is aware that they are closer than they’ve ever been. 

Clumsily, she wriggles a hand between them, works at the knot on his tie, suddenly irrationally afraid that it will choke him if she does not get it off. She sets it on her side table, runs both hands through his hair. His face is snug against her chest, tears soaking through her blouse, and her head feels fuzzy, unfocused. 

And Mulder’s held her just like this before, when she’s needed him. Pulled her close after Pfaster, after Schnauz, after other, nameless traumas. There’s a whole world buried against his chest, just the two of them barely breathing, hidden away from everyone else’s view. The last dredges of his cologne mixed with a day’s worth of effort burrowing its way past her senses, waking up every part of her that she suppresses in his presence.

Sobs smothered in his shirt, and liquid arousal stirring low in her abdomen, coming hand in hand every time. And this is why she knows, deep in her gut, that he’s hard as stone. 

“Mulder,” she tells him, a low murmur, cradles the deep wound of his head closer. _Oh, Mulder, Mulder, Mulder. What have you done to yourself?_

When his mouth presses to the valley between her breasts, Scully isn’t remotely surprised. And yet, she gasps anyway, just a little, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. Not from grief, but from raw emotion.

His lips are damp enough to feel it through her shirt. She frames his skull with her palms, and pulls his head away, needing to look at him. 

Like a lost boy, like a stray dog, he is wide-eyed and wanting, his jaw loose on the hinges. Irises more green than she’s ever seen them in the lamplight, pupils swollen like fresh bruises, cheeks glossy with tears. 

“Scully,” he pleads, and his hands are huge on her ribs, fingers spreading as if he knows that she is his. 

She wants to hold him, to draw him back up into the light. She wants, desperately, to kiss him. Instead, attempting to compromise, she unbuttons her blouse, all the way down.

There is no finesse in the way that he buries his face in her offering. He paws off the fabric, grabs at her newly bare back, his lips open against the swells of her breasts. He’s hardly touched her, but the cotton is already too rough against her nipples, pebbled and aching for attention. That, she tells herself, is the reason why she sheds her bra, too.

Mulder makes a noise she can only describe as a growl, palms just below her shoulder blades like wings, pushes her chest forward. His mouth envelops her nipple, tongue and teeth, and she bites back a moan. When he palms her other breast, she crushes her thighs together, blushing at the slick wetness she can feel soaking through her panties. 

He nips at the bud between his lips, and as the slight shock of pain ricochets through her ribcage, it hits her that she has long since crossed into unfamiliar territory, no map to guide her through this underworld and no way back to safety. Clutching a handful of his hair, she groans softly, and he understands, bites again, this time hard enough to make her cry out. As his tongue soothes the ache, she is dizzy, slow with arousal. 

With a tug on his hair, his teeth move to the flesh of her breast, scraping as he sucks, and she is weakened just imagining the marks he’ll leave, purple and red, rendering her indisputably his. There is a moment where she realizes that he must be claiming her intentionally, and then a moment where she doesn’t breathe.

This time, when she pulls his head away from her chest, she ducks to kiss him without hesitation, cradling his jaw in her hands. The heady groan he heaves into her mouth is thick on her tongue, and she gives it back to him, slow laps against his lips, against the roof of his mouth, leaving him smudged and defiled with her lipstick. Her breasts ache, as if the pain inside her ribcage has migrated outwards, and she can feel her cunt pulse as he bites down on her lip. 

Surfacing for air, she looks down at him, her heartbeat pounding in her ears. His mouth is open, red pigment smeared across it like blood, and he looks as if he’s about to speak. She doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking, not now. Desperately, she pulls his face back into her chest instead.

Ducking lower, he kisses her stomach, her abdomen, her belly button as if it’s her mouth. There is a print of his lips below her breasts, and a shadow of deep red below where he’s dragged his mouth against her, tracking the softness of her skin like an animal. His hands are on her hips, his breath humid against her skin, and when his fingertips trace the faint line of hair leading down beneath her pants, her field of vision narrows, head spinning drunkenly. 

Scully can’t ask him to do it, can’t do it herself. She knows this. He knows this. 

He does it instead, and as he slides down the zipper, she sucks in air to fill her overworked lungs. Thumbs hooking into the waistband, he pushes her slacks down her legs and her panties with them, leaves them to pool on the floor. His palms are too hot on her bare thighs, on her hips. She can smell her own arousal, and when she looks down at him, his nostrils are flared, lips parted hungrily.

The realization of Mulder’s desire for her knocks the breath out of her more than her own need. He stares up at her for a moment, lost and tragically beautiful as Hamlet himself, and then he is sliding off of her bed and dragging her down onto it. 

His face is hovering between her thighs in moments, and she props herself up on her elbows, the urge to bolt burning up in her cheeks but the need to have him keeping her locked in place. He’s staring, just staring, his jaw hanging open slightly, and she almost closes her legs, his breath so close that she can feel it against her center. 

As if he senses her unsureness, he presses his palms to the backs of her thighs, spreads them wider, exposing her fully. She bites down on her lip, tries not to buck forwards, and when he kisses the inside of her thigh softly, she lets out a faint sob.

She’s craved him, craved _this_ , since the day she met him, has waited for years. Having him so suddenly is entirely too much, but there’s no escaping now. The look on his face is indescribable, unfathomable, predatory, and she knows that he would hunt her down, trap her beneath his weight, and devour her whole. 

The thought makes her want him so badly that she has to look away, flushed red with desire and embarrassment. 

But there’s no escaping his presence, either, not even when she can’t see him. His scent, permeating her very cells. His breath, coating her slick lips. His hands, firm and unforgiving as they hold her open. His voice. 

“God,” he says, throaty and low, and then, “ _Scully_.”

She wants to say his name, wants to run before he can commit the sight of her to memory, wants to grab for his hair and pull him in. All she can manage is a whimper, a straining of her thighs against him. The impulsive recklessness that had consumed him after she opened her blouse seems to have faded into the background, replaced now by a different kind of desperation. 

“All for me,” he murmurs, and it’s a statement, not a question, but she nods furiously regardless, because it always has been. He breathes her in, audibly, and she whines, tears forming in the corners of her eyes at his reverence, his refusal to self-indulge. Again, “God, Scully.”

Finally, his tongue is nestling against her entrance, and she gasps. He licks her slowly, slowly, parting her folds, drinking in her arousal, stops just short of her clit. She cannot help it, this time, how her hips shoot forwards. He presses down on her thighs, keeps her in place, exposed and trembling with need. He kisses the inside of her hip, the curls of hair just beside where she wants him, nuzzles into the space between her thigh and her slit. And then, he does it all again. 

Scully lets out a sob, gathers the blankets in her fists so as not to grab for his head instead. The tip of his tongue pushes inside, barely, just enough to make her head spin. She can’t ever remember being so sensitive, wanting anyone with such an irrefutable need, deep in her belly like an earthquake. He bites into the soft flesh at the inside of her thigh, and then sucks harshly as she fights against his hold.

He’s been so rough with her skin, bite marks and smudged lipstick on her stomach and her breasts. And yet, his breath wreathes her cunt incredibly gently, worshipful kisses pressed against her swollen lips, his jaw clenched tightly in some senseless effort to hold himself restrained. 

As always, he is a wild exercise in duality, her Mulder. Constantly in reckless, hotheaded pursuit, without care for the consequences, but uncertain and careful when it comes to the things she needs from him most. Exhausted and tortured, but refusing to let go and drift into the peaceful nonexistence of a normal everyday life. Holding her in place like a caged animal, as if she’ll vanish into the night if he lets her go, but refusing to deliver the killing blow. As if he knows that she is his, but doesn’t know that she’s waiting to die for him, to cut every tie with reality as she knows it and descend into Hell like Orpheus after Eurydice.

“Mulder,” she gasps. He presses his face into her thigh with a low groan that might’ve been need or agony. She can’t grant him sleep, can’t soothe his pain, can’t find him answers or give him back any of what he’s lost. 

She lets go of the blankets and relaxes her strained muscles, palms the back of his head tenderly instead, murmurs _please_. Prays with closed eyes that he will let her be a safe haven to bury himself in. That he will make use of the only thing she has to give him, spread out easy and inviting for him to take. 

There is a silken moment of silence, just five quick beats of her clumsy heart and the not-sound of Mulder holding his breath. 

And then, he kisses her clit, finally, wet tongue and warm lips. 

The rush in her stomach isn’t quite relief, and the strong pulses of his mouth against her are enough to make her cry out, oversensitive as she is. His hands move down towards her center, no longer holding her open, and keeping her legs from closing around his head takes every bit of focus she has left. When his thumbs push bluntly into her cunt, first one and then the other, she cries out, arches like a cat. 

The unrestrained pleasure feels like madness, branching into the perfect kind of pain as the pad of his thumb digs into her inside walls. The splitting ache deep in her gut is unbearable, and the raw strokes of his tongue against her clit don’t cease or slow, even when her thighs snap shut around his ears. 

His jaw locks in place, and as he sucks her clit into his mouth as roughly as he had her nipple, the sensations reach a peak. She crashes over the edge suddenly and without warning, awareness of her surroundings falling away like the ground beneath her.

Dimly, Scully is aware of her own keens, of the low moans he makes with his face buried in her cunt. Her whole body a live wire, his mouth still stroking her, his thumb tucked up against her front wall, every sensation absent except overwhelming pleasure. 

She spreads her quivering legs wider, and seizes handfuls of Mulder’s hair, her core clenching with delicious aftershocks. It is with effort that she lifts his face away from her center, reaches down to grab his shoulder, attempting futilely to tug him towards her. He stands unsteadily, leaning over her, and she knows that he understands.

The scramble to join her on the bed is clumsy, and she struggles with the buttons on his shirt, ripping the last two apart in her need to feel his bare skin against hers. There isn’t time to shed his slacks, only to paw at his fly until he helps her work it open. She rubs her palm over her own wetness, and then wraps it around his cock, hot and hard as she slicks him with her arousal. 

“Scully,” he manages, his breath hitching, hips thrusting uncontrollably into her hand. She reaches up to wrap her arm around his neck, pulls him down for a sloppy kiss, licks the remainders of her lipstick off of his mouth. 

His hunched up body radiates need, his cock throbbing against her fingers. She can’t stop staring at it, just as big as she’s always imagined, and she hasn’t fucked anyone since she met him, and she wants to fit him like a surgical glove, latex stretched and sleek, reshaped forcibly from inside. 

She spreads her legs and tugs gently on his shaft, urging him to nestle between. One of his hands tucks under her chin, tilting up until she meets his eyes. There’s deep-set sadness there, just like before – only now, it’s shaded over by hunger, by need. By something else, beautiful and dark and endless, that she can’t name and doesn’t want to. She knows, right in the center of her chest, that she’s mirroring it back up at him like deep river water. 

His Ophelia, this time beloved, drowning herself in tragedy and flowers. 

When he finally enters her, Scully finds herself crying for him helplessly. The first thrust doesn’t hurt, and neither does the second, or the third, or the fourth, her body too flooded with endorphins to feel anything but numbness and pleasure. 

Winding her legs around his hips, she clings to him, grabs at his arms and leans up to press her mouth against his chest. There isn’t enough of her to hide him, to give to him. She tries anyway, enfolding him in her limbs, panting into his shoulder as he gasps and groans into her hair. 

Already, she knows that she likely won’t come again, that she doesn’t care to anyway. The feeling on its own is enough, and the knowledge that she can fix him just for a little while, take him inside and keep him safe from all of the things that he will so easily allow to harm him. The heaves of his breath atop her head, the head of his cock settling deep inside her, the unending pleasurable warmth between her thighs. She lines his collarbone clumsily with kisses, coordination barely there, too swept up in the wash of emotion and feeling to focus. 

It goes on forever, but still, somehow, it ends too soon. In her dreams, she thinks, her inevitable fantasies, Mulder will fuck her like this for hours, reposition her when she tires of holding on, press her face-first into the blankets and ride her until she can’t breathe, ceaselessly filling her. Murmur the words he’ll never say in real life into her shoulder. 

She hooks her ankles together behind his back, pulls him in as deep as she can bear as he shudders and finds his release, unwilling to risk the possibility that he might pull out, deprive himself of making this final claim on what she’s given him. 

As soon as he’s spilled inside of her, he grows tight with panic, as if about to flee. It’s her turn, she knows, to hold him down. He slips out, his ribs quaking, and she rolls them over, drapes her body across his. One hand on each of his elbows, pulling his arms around her, and her mouth buried under his jaw, sleep-soft kisses planted around the insistent bump of his pulse. A desperate attempt to coax him back into his body, this time with comfort instead of sex. 

She should be terrified of what this means, knows that morning might find her locked in her own bathroom, shut down by panic. But as Mulder cries softly into her hair, tense and scared, all she can think is that he needed her. Needs her, still, his only lifeline to the world of the living. His only reminder that he is, himself, still alive. 

Nuzzling closer, Scully smooths her palm across his side in an effort to calm him. The crown of her head is damp with tears, and she wants to cover them both with flowers, sympathy and grace and remembrance, a good end, set out in the water and rocked gently downstream. She wants to take his hands in her own, and lead him out of the darkness, back into the warmth of spring.

He chokes out her name faintly, arms enfolding her with purpose, and she closes her eyes. Orpheus and Ophelia had both been defined by their singing, she recalls, had descended into madness accompanied by lyrics and attempted to transcend death alongside lovers with a melody on their lips.

She doesn’t think of how their stories ended. Instead, she begins to hum softly into his neck, like a lullaby, like a dirge, like a love song. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is yet another post-ep smut fic that I don't actually think happened, but am obsessed with conceptually nonetheless. It's also posted on tumbr @kittenscully. Please let me know what you think, here or there, via comments/asks/messages/tags/whatever you like.


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